Robert Lyman was an officer in the British Army for 20 years. Educated at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, he served in Bosnia and Northern Ireland. He is an acclaimed expert on the history of the Middle East and is the author of First Victory, a book about Britain's forgotten struggle in the Middle East in 1941.
This is what he has to say...
Even moderately informed opinion in every generation has acknowledged the ancient truth that, if left to its own devices, history will repeat itself. This is especially true if that history is concerned with the short-term pragmatism of power politics. Nowhere else on the planet in modern times is this truth more unfortunately manifest than in the Middle East. In large part the West continues to deal with the region through the lens of its own strategic ambition....
During World War Two the criticality of the area to Great Britain's survival against a rampant fascist totalitarianism was only gradually recognised in London. When it did so, intervention came quickly, and after a faltering start, was ultimately decisive. Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Iran became the instruments of international power play that secured for Great Britain the eastern flank of the Nile (Rommel was pressing at Egypt's western gates) and the means to continue the war - oil.
At the time the United States had yet to commit herself completely
to the Commonwealth cause, and the Soviet Union remained tentatively,
and ignorantly, an ally of Hitler, at least until her blinkers were
removed as the result of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Securing
the region against the forces of fascism by invading successively Iraq,
Syria and then Iran, also denied, in Great Britain's mind, the region's
oil to
Germany, although there is no evidence to support. These
imperatives led Winston Churchill to assert that, in war, there are no
laws. With Great Britain fighting for its survival, political
expediency was the lesser of a range of other evils. Certainly, the
invasion of Iran in August 1941 by Great Britain and the Soviet Union,
long forgotten in popular memory in the West, was of the same dubious
legality as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The parallels between then
and now are many: sharp battles for places that have a sinisterly
modern ring - Basra, Fallujah, Ramadi and Baghdad - ignorance and
exaggeration in assessing the military threat, and an extraordinarily
inept diplomacy. How little changes as history marches on.
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